projects ideas and titles for final year student

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The most difficult part of writing a Final Year Project (FYP) is often 'where to begin'. Here are a few tips to help you..

Think of a topic in your course that you have found particularly interesting. This may be a chapter or an issue in a book associated with your course. Or it could be the wole or part of an assignment that you wished to explore in more detail. On the other hand, in the social sciences and business, there may be an issue in the news (read a good newspaper regularly!) that excites your attention.

Make sure that the issue is researchable. This means that there must be a literature base either in textbooks or periodicals. The literature base needs to be academic and not journalistic to add to the credibility of your FYP

Be prepared to spend several hours in an academic library to help you search out good sources on your intended topic. Remember the Internet is good for some things but there is no 'quality control' so some of the articles you get might be too emphemeral or journalistic for an academic piece of work.

It is probably better to think of the whole of your final year project as essentially answering a question rather than researching a field.

Make a plan of the chapters. Your plan is likely to look like this:

Introduction

Literature review

Updating/applying new research

Recent developments

Case study/small survey

Conclusion

Think of reading around the subject and writing your initial plan as a process in which each activity reinforces the other in a circular process. Do some initial research, then make a tentative plan, then do more reading to 'flesh out' the plan, then revise the plan and so on. Your plan only needs to be tentative at this stage - in all probability it will actually get revised as you make progress through your project. You should provide your tutor with a copy of your plan on your first substantive meeting.

Do not think you have to do all of the reading around the topic before you start to write. Read or research sufficiently to write the first chapter (literature review) and then start writing a first draft

When you start writing, set yourself a target - say 500-1000 words per day and then you will feel that you are making progress

You might also like to consult the document Planning.doc which details three stages in the formulation of a final year project. [The large document may take a minute to load]
Literature Review

A literature review is basically a summary of 'what the academic literature reveals' about the subject of your investigation. You can always try the 'little green man from Mars test' as follows:

Little Green Man from Mars: What do we know about motivation at work?

Student: Well, one approach to motivation would start off with a psychological approach as exemplified in the work of Maslow who argues that... and we could then explore the work of Herzberg, McGregor...Meanwhile the more sociological approaches would explore concepts such as 'orientation to work' ...

Points to bear in mind are:

As a starting point, a literature review should summarise the major authors/contributions in a field.

However, it needs to contextualise each contribution (eg. 'the work of Maslow has been enormously influential and has directed attention to a series of innate needs to be expressed in work. However, Maslow is frequently misinterpreted because of.....We could also argue that Maslow failed to take sufficiently into account the essentially social nature of behaviour in work ..')

It also needs to critically evaluate each contribution(eg. 'purely psychological explanations to motivation tend to be individualistic and need to take account of supervisory styles, management cultures and organisational variables')

Your literature review is only the starting point. Later chapters will make reference to more up-to-date or specialist literature as you proceed

Your literature review needs to have some academic respectability. It is important that your literature review is not based purely upon anonymous material gleaned from the Internet, press cuttings which are self-opinionated and the like.

Using a search engine such as Google will generate useful sources of advice for you...

What next ?

Once the literature review chapter has been written, you are ready to tackle the main body of the final year project and you may wish to consider the following issues.

Methodology
You explain why and how you intend to conduct your investigation. For many final year projects, this will consist of 'desk research' perhaps complemented by some empirical work such as a small scale survey involving questionnaires and/or interview, a case study, observations etc.

If you do undertook an empirical investigation, you will need at a later point in the survey to discuss more technical methodological issues such as your methods of sampling, choice of sampling frame, piloting, rationale for the collection of data and so on. Some projects e.g. in science, psychology may consist largely of the examination of your own survey or experimental data.

Re-state the question
Remember that the whole of your project should be an extended answer to a question rather than the discussion of an area). For example, a question such as 'does e-marketing offer competitive advantage' is more focused than 'current trends in e-marketing' Good final year projects are likely to be those that show a good 'dialogue' with the material rather than just a summary of available data. Also be very wary of attempting to prove a hypothesis whatever advice some texts may give you! The eminent industrialist and author, Geoffrey Vickers, in trying to make sense of 40 years of experience in the world of human affairs was always cogently critical of those who blithely try to apply the methods of natural science to social phenomena. (However, the use of statistical hypothesis testing is another matter and is indeed a way in which a final year project can distinguish itself. This should be left to the appropriate chapter in which you are analysing the data you have collected yourself).

Detailed presentation and evaluation of evidence
The evidence ('facts and figures') that you have collected as a result of your searches should be presented and evaluated at this point. Remember that 'facts and figures' do not necessarily 'speak for themselves' and have to be interpreted. Nonetheless, the more powerful final year projects are those in which a case is built by a rigorous examination of the data. It may well be that some of the evidence does not directly support either a case 'for' or 'against' the question that you are asking. This is not unusual but your academic skill will lie in the way in which you use and evaluate and evaluate the evidence to answer your central research question.

Use of secondary and documentary sources
Historians have well developed skills in establishing the 'provenance' of a document and it is worth taking a leaf out of their book at this stage. For example, it is worth considering the authorship and the context in which any particular document is written. For example, a government report is likely to carry more weight than that of a pressure group advocating a change in the law! (This does not make the government report 'right' and the pressure group data 'suspect' - just use your judgment as a lawyer would to evaluate the quality of evidence you have collected). One of the problems with material gathered over the internet, for example, is that it could be written by anybody and has not necessarily been subject to the quality control procedures (such as refereeing) of a typical academic journal article.

Logical skills
It is possible to exercise your logical skills in thinking about evidence, even in cases when you cannot find or collect any such evidence! For example, you could argue that a final answer to the question whether 'e-marketing offers competitive advantage' would lie in presenting data that shows the decreasing profitability and/or viability of companies that do not engage in e-marketing
and such data might be impossible to find or collect in the context of a student final year project. Nonetheless, you will gain academic credit for observing that this is the data that you would need in order to present a definitive answer to the question.

Dividing material into chapters
This substantive point of your project is likely to form Chapters 3 and 4 (assuming that Chapter 1 is an Introduction and Chapter 2 is a Literature Review)

Be prepared to organise your material into reasonably coherent chapters rather than a multitude of sections. The second or last of these chapters may well be an examination of the most recently published data or theories that bear upon your question.

Make your chapters 'flow' well from one to the next
Your project should appear logically well-connected so that you are taking the reader 'by the hand' and taking them from one stage of the argument to the next. For example, you might have been examining the literature base at quite a general level and then wish to turn to more specific material or to recent developments in a subsequent chapter. Be particularly careful to ensure that any survey work you do appears 'well connected' with the rest of your work and is derived from, and contributes to, the issues you have raised in the preceding chapters. A common failing of survey work is for it appear as an 'add-on' which is not well integrated into the rest of the project.

Golden threads
By 'golden threads' we mean the issues or questions that you have set for yourself at the start of your project and keep occurring throughout the project to 'tie it all together' Keeping a list of your 'golden threads' or recurring issues by your side as you write is a good way of ensuring that your chapters flow logically,e.g. by addressing a question at one level (e.g. in the literature) and then at another (recent developments, local case study, your own survey)

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